Blessed is the Man
by words without
Summary: "The rotters say they have been chosen by their prophet but Gary knows better. He has offered himself as the savior of Roarton, and his violence is judged Divine." Gary's life in Roarton.


AN: You could maaaaaaybe look at this as some sort of wickedly unhealthy one-sided Gary/Kieren, but it's not really meant to be. It's more blood-lust than Kieren-lust. I think.

Also I'm a damn Yankee so if this reads like an American trying to write British characters...well, that's because it is exactly that. Sorry.

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><p><strong><em>Blessed is the Man<em>**

The rotters say they have been chosen by their prophet but Gary knows better. He has offered himself as the savior of Roarton, and his violence is judged Divine.

_-i-_

For most of Gary's life there's not a lot expected of him. Born and bred of basic stock, no one in his family gone farther afield then the next town over for all his life, except for an aunt who visited London and despised it. She came back with tales of modern-day Sodom, all whores and fags and bankers (Jews, the lot of 'em). She spoke with breathless horror of almost being run down - in the zebra crossing! - by some foreigner driving a flashy car, a flashier car mind you than anyone in Roarton's likely to afford despite their being English for how many hundreds of years, doesn't seem to matter a bit these days, does it now, if you're a working citizen or some terrorist-breeding tart on the dole?

But that's London, she said. Roarton is different. It's always been.

Gary, all of thirteen, agrees. And the next time he happens to be in line at the Save 'n Shop behind that scrawny arse bandit Kieren Walker, he elbows him into a display of canned peaches.

For most of Gary's life he's not expecting much. Spends a while thinking about the army but in the end it's Rick Macy who goes - no surprise there, his old man raised him right, but catch the look on Kieren Walker's face. Like someone's taken a two-by-four to his head. Gary laughs to hide his disgust, to hide his joy, to hide something else he doesn't name. Pain and pleasure, says the Vicar when Rick goes, these too are the provinces of the Lord.

For most of Gary's life he's right where Roarton wants him, at a table in the pub with Dean and Rick and their mates. Bill Macy too, sometimes. The lads complain, it's harder to get pissed and silly with him around, but Gary respects him. Respects his graveled voice, respects the smack of his hand to the table to emphasis a point. Respects how everyone, even the Vicar, sits a bit straighter and talks a bit sterner with him around. Bill's a man, a good one.

Even when Rick dies. Especially when Rick dies. They hold services though there's no body. Gary takes himself over to the funeral, wet and uncomfortable in a borrowed suit, but Bill's dressed in hunting fatigues and looks almost sullen as the Vicar reads the rites. He leaves the comforting of his wife to her friends. Gary comes up to him after, offers him his condolences, and is surprised when the bereaved father only glares at him like he's said the wrong thing.

Bill's back at the pub the next evening, and he's back the night after that, and he's back the nights that follow even as the weather turns and Steve Walker comes in asking all shaky-like if anyone's seen his son and the village holds a second funeral. Gary doesn't go to that one.

For most of his life Gary is akin to any other man in any other rural town.

Then comes the Rising.

_-i-_

Bill Macy waits exactly one week - long enough for the village's sheriff to get his throat torn out, long enough for the first pack of rotters to come down from the woods in their bile and stink, long enough for it to be clear that the military, if there still is a military, has absolutely no intention of saving Roarton while it's there to be saved. Then he forms the HVF.

Gary joins, of course, and so do most of the lads - and the ones who don't look away when the militia comes by on rounds, and bloody good of them to do so the soft bastards, hiding inside with Mummy while Gary and his mates kill their relatives and neighbors a second time. Jem Walker joins also, and there's a surprise: she's young and pale and pretty, and running over with anger, and she wants a gun, and she wants to fight.

"My cup runneth over," says the Vicar at Sunday's service. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. _Those who dwell therein_," he thunders, a mighty sight for sure. But no mightier than Bill Macy up front with ten rotter kills already to his name.

"Those who ignore the word of God shall be punished," says the Vicar, "and those who defy Him, and those who seek to corrupt His word. Corruption! That is what has risen here, that's what you fight. Corruption made flesh."

Gary knows very little about religion but he knows the force of truth. He knows it as surely as he knew that Roarton was not London and had no need for London's filth.

After the service Bill sends the militia out on patrol. Gary ends up in the truck with Jem Walker, who stares out the window at the grey, empty streets and the forest of fresh horrors beyond. Corpses twice-dead will fill the truck's bed before sunset.

Some of the lads eye Jem when her back's turned, some of them grin and wink and wish they could get her alone in the truck. Not Gary, though. As he steers them both down the dead road he glances at her, uncertain. Though he's never been shy.

She sees him looking and stiffens. "What?"

_Are you really a Walker_? he wants to ask. But, "Just thinking it's a good thing you've joined up. Do your duty, like," is what he says. "Why did you?"

Jem frowns at the gun in her lap. She practices with it at all hours when not on patrol and already Gary thinks she could probably out-shoot him. She's killed three rotters and Gary's killed four and his aim's never as sure as when she's there with him pointing look-out, fingers spread.

"The graveyard," she starts to say, "my brother..."

Gary frowns.

Then: "Sod it," Jem shrugs, "it's the end of the world and my mum and dad are useless. Thought I might as well. Don't fancy running off, leaving Roarton to the zombies, y'know?"

Gary nods. Oh, he knows. _Corruption is risen, corruption made flesh_, he thinks, and grips the wheel with a sudden, piercing joy.

_-i-_

He doesn't think about the things he's killing. He doesn't have to. Hardly time to match faces to names when you've got a jaw snapping shut on your arm. Stenchy buggers these rotters are. One of the men thinks he sees his gran and goes whimpering-useless; Gary has to blow the rabid's brains out himself, nearly loses a hand. Stupid. They're walking sacks of rotting flesh and that's all they are. What else could they be?

Bill Macy doesn't forget it, at least. He trains the HVF and praises them and tells them to act like what they are. Like heroes. Heroes doing what others should have done, and doing it very well, thanks. Meanwhile the government's doing bugger all.

"Can't wait for 'em," Bill likes to say. "Can't trust 'em. It's us as have to handle matters and mind you remember that when it's done. Think they'll come out throwing medals round yer neck? They'll forget. They'll all of them forget unless you stand up for what yer owed."

What they're owed. Because for the first time in his life Gary is more than what's expected of him, more than another know-nothing gone arse over elbows every Friday at the pub. He's a hero. Him and Bill and Jem, all of them, tramping through the mud, grinning like kings, blood drying under their nails. (And he thinks that Jem is a marvel, considering the family she comes from, considering the dithering parents and the dead queer brother with those sad, sad eyes. He thinks that Jem is like him: they've both risen beyond. Both of them, all of them, become the chosen warriors of the Lord.)

Gary has never been as happy as he is during the Rising.

_-i-_

Jem finds Kieren - some reeking approximation of Kieren - in the Save 'n Shop. The military shows up at last and says orders are to capture, not to kill. London's in an uproar, some new wonder drug, what a waste. Takes you a year to see a doctor these days, the NHS is overwhelmed, but there's time and money to waste on the dead.

"Corruption," says the Vicar, mighty as ever. "The wages of sin." The day after the military's capture edict is announced Bill Macy dumps three dead rotters - really truly good and dead - outside the town's new quarantine pen. Bill Macy is mightier still.

The herds thin. Most of the rotters were old at first death and they're easy prey. The young ones are trickier, they hide out, they plan. The forest will be haunted by rabids or the worn ghost of rabids for years. Jem finds Kieren and she runs out of bullets, she tells Gary, before she can put him down for good. Her eyes are wide and her hands are cupped steady around her lit fag against the wind and she is so, so beautiful. And she looks nothing like her brother with rotter goo splashed across her face.

Jem finds Kieren. The Rising ends.

_-i-_

The people remember, until they forget. They stand Gary drinks and Pearl keeps the photos of the militia's dead on the wall of the pub, for a little while. The Vicar preaches with hot hate against the repartition scheme, against the idea that rotter killers should ever be allowed back near the families they destroyed. Bill preaches too, in his own way.

(As far as Gary's concerned the only mistake Bill ever made was stopping at just the one example killing. Everyone knew Steve and Sue Walker were hiding a rotter in their house, keeping it around Jem even, forcing her to live with it just down the hall. It'd be so easy to fix things. It'd be so right.)

The Vicar preaches and Bill preaches and Gary hears them, God Almighty he is listening, but what to do when the rest of Roarton goes deaf? Even Jem, though she huffs and scowls and attends every HVF meeting until the disbandment. She complains about the rotter in her house but it's more a younger sibling whinging about the elder. It makes Gary sick to listen, truth be told.

Things go so _wrong_ with the end of the Rising. The Vicar dies, and Bill Macy dies - _and on the third day he was risen_, quotes a voice in Gary's head - and Rick Macy...well, best not to think about Rick. And the rotters! Everywhere, walking like they've a right to the town, to the streets Gary once chased them through. Not wearing their makeup. Not wearing their lenses. Can't trust them to take the right drugs. Going to _work_ and _school_ and looking with _judgment_ on the heroes of the war...!

And Kieren bloody Walker. Kieren and his friends. That Amy smiling with black lips. That cold-eyed bastard in the oversized jumper with his icy hands around Gary's neck. No rotter should be that strong. No rotter should be allowed to touch him and get away.

But he's not allowed to kill them now, is Gary, and not allowed to call them rotters neither. Hardly any quid on offer to bring them in alive. No, now they're PDS sufferers and he must pat them on the head and say, there there! Never mind! So you ate your mother and your dog and would have eaten me. It's forgiven. Ta!

Kieren Walker and his rabid friends, plotting, always plotting. Talking about their Undead Prophet, about the dead bursting forth again from the grave to overtake the living. Radicals, they are, only no one sees it. Not even the new MP, strange one that she ends up being, her mind off on some tangent Gary can't place. He'd hoped she'd be his new leader but she looks at him like he's common village scum. She looks at him like he's Kieren.

Bill Macy told him he was a hero. The Vicar called him a warrior-servant of the Lord.

And if he is the hero then the rotters are the enemy. Kieren and his faggy mates are the enemy. And no one but Gary even sees.

So he does what he must. For Jem, for her lips on his and the memory of blood on her face. For Roarton, beloved and blind. For Bill Macy, and for the Vicar, who foretold the Second Rising. And for Kieren Walker.

The old prophets are dead, so Gary does what he must.

_-i-_

He drags Kieren out to his truck, pressing the struggling body tight against him. At one point Kieren manages to bite his hand and Gary's stomach lurches with revulsion-bliss at the feel of blood and bite marks, hot breath on his skin. (And how is the breath warm when the rest of the body is cold as the grave?)

He drags Kieren into the field, plants a knee in his back above his bound arms, speaks over the rotter's cursing. "Simon is planning an attack," he says, "and I won't let it happen. This is Roarton, d'you hear, this is mine. This is justice, and, and..."

"You're a nutter," comes Kieren's muffled shout. "I don't know anything about an attack."

"You don't know anything about the Second Rising?"

"I don't, actually, you're the one barging into my room with Bible verses..."

"Stop talking down to me!" He kicks Kieren once, has no idea if it hurts, has no idea if it's possible to hurt a rotter, doesn't care. Doesn't care about the rotter's sad, sad eyes. Has never cared.

He pours the Blue Oblivion powder into the hole on Kieren's neck, sneering over the rotter's cries as they turn from cries of rage to cries of fear. There is no pleasure in it, though. Not like there used to be during the Rising. This is grim work. Bill never took any real delight in the hunt, either. He did what he had to do for his home.

Gary frees Kieren's arms and gives him another kick to get him moving. Kieren lurches up and away, face contoured, dead eyes dancing with their terror. Already he's starting to stagger. If Gary ever dreamed about the Rising he thinks he'd dream about that zombie lurch, coming at him in the dark.

That's why he's here. The treatment center isn't enough - this isn't a _disease_, that's a lot of rot from scientists who never had to stand alone and freezing in the forest, watching a shadow drag itself closer with black bile dripping down its chin. This is about war, about armies, about the Risen and their heresies. For a while he thought Simon might be the Undead Prophet, but after today, after just now, he knows Simon's only the most forked-tongued of disciples. The false prophet, he thinks, must be Roarton's own.

Kieren stumbles away from him, down the hill. In the distance drumming starts, from the direction of the churchyard. They'll find him there and kill him and Roarton will be saved: the village will do its own dirty work for once, instead of cowering behind the HVF and then letting them take the blame. They'll all remember. Gary fishes the radio from the floor of his truck and calls Jem.

_-i-_

It doesn't work.

_-i-_

Afterwards he does dream about the Rising, for the first time in his life. It's not what he expected. There aren't any forests and he isn't chasing rabids down. There's only dark, dark heat, jungle heat almost, thick and steamy and beading on his forehead, and the slippery mass of entrails by his feet, on his hands, at his lips. And carefully he separates the pieces, the intestines from the lungs, carefully he sorts through with the odor playing tricks. It is a lovely night and his stomach rumbles. For some reason his fatigues are a size too big.

"The Second Rising, fuck your Second Rising," he says to Kieren, and if that's Kieren looking at him then is it Simon he's got all minced up at his feet? Doesn't matter. Kieren squirms on bound arms and Gary puts a rough hand to his throat and feels the dead pulse - there's a pulse but somehow he knows it's a trick - Kieren still looking at him with those wide eyes and Gary wonders will he bleed red or black and will it come out fast or slow?

He kneels in the entrails to get a closer look. Kieren's not wearing his rotter makeup so it's safe to clamp a hand over his mouth, safe to run his tongue over Kieren's cheek, but the flesh is so warm, so startlingly warm, just goes to show the dead can't be trusted but Gary's the hero and he's on to all their games.

He looks down to see the color of the blood soaking into his trousers. He looks and looks and looks.

_-i-_

A fortnight or so after Jem breaks up with Gary, he sees her father trudging from the bus stop. Gary is at the quarantine pen, looking through the mesh - just looking, staring in at how empty and useless it's all become - and when he sees Steve walk by he runs after him almost without thought. Sometimes it's easy to forget that everyone in Roarton thinks he's a tosser for doing what they all wanted him to do.

"Steve," he says, breath puffing in the cold, reaching to tap the man's shoulder, "all right, mate..."

Steve does stop and turn to look at him, but he's gone as stiff as a board. "Something you wanted, then, Gary?" he mutters.

Gary forces out a laugh. "Yeah, actually - ah, it's Jem, I've been trying to get in touch with her and she won't-"

"I'm under orders from Jem that if I see you I'm supposed to kick you in the shin and call you a right wanker," Steve announces. It's not exactly threatening, considering Steve Walker is a walking middle-aged dad joke, but he looks dead serious. "If she wanted to talk to you she'd ring you up, only I suppose that hasn't happened."

Gary swallows a swear. "Look, I've been trying to explain to her what happened-"

"We know what happened," Steve says coldly. "Heard it all from Kieren, didn't we?" He shakes his head. "We were going to send Kier away," Steve says with weary amazement. "We were really going to send him off 'cos of people like you. Can't believe it, can you? It's like waking up from a dream wondering, what were you doing? Where's the logic in what you did?"

Impatient - because what Steve Walker does or doesn't think isn't shit to Gary but he's the only way to Jem - Gary snaps, "Kieren went rabid. He took Blue Oblivion and went rabid and you're lucky he didn't kill you."

"Heard it otherwise from Kier. If it pleases you I'll believe my son."

"That thing is not your son!" Gary shouts. He kicks at the gravel in the road, sends a stone flying. "That thing is a walking corpse. That thing – it—"

But here's the odd thing about Steve Walker: he's so benignly amiable that it's usually hard to take him seriously, but when he's this angry he seems to grow ten inches. He jabs Gary's shoulder once, and again, and a third time, putting more force into each one until Gary actually falls back a step.

"You stay away from Kieren," he says, "and Jem, you just stay away from my family, alright? And from Simon too, you keep your distance from him too."

"_Simon_?"

"Well, sure, he's..." Steve hesitates a second, but only a second, and then draws himself back to full height. "He's Kieren's, isn't he? He's good with Kier."

"He's a bleeding radical! He's plotting, they're all plotting the Second Rising! And you'll be wanting my help the next time the rotters turn rabid!"

"The only time Kier's turned it's been with help from you. So you worry about your Second Rising and I'll worry about my family, thank you, because we certainly don't need any more of your help."

"You miserable git," Gary screams at Steve's back, but Steve strides off like he's alone in the world and Gary's left a silly fool shouting in the middle of the street. "You're all a bunch of idiots - did you forget the _Rising_, then, did you...?"

There's a car behind him honking and he bolts, heading for the forest because there are still rabids in the forest, everyone knows it, and if he can just bag one it'll prove he's been right all along - they'll stand him pints at the pub, Pearl will put the photos of the dead back on the wall - queer little Kieren Walker - even the MP's lost her mind, the whole of Roarton's done for if they don't wake up and realize where they are—

The forest is blocked by the new perimeter fence. Gary tears his palm open tugging at it but the rotters did decent work, always in his way aren't they, the damned thing won't give. He jogs alongside it for a bit, following it as it cuts across the hill, and then in the distance is the churchyard and he knows there are rotters in the churchyard. Put them back in their graves.

It's drizzling when he gets there, no one around, the church looming in sodden black stone. Everything's muck and mud. He's not dressed right, he's not in his fatigues. And he's done a shit job of leading the militia. But he can't be wrong about this, he can't be and he isn't, he's heard the talk of the Second Rising, he knows there is a false prophet. They're here, in this churchyard, and he can stop them. He's been ordained. Bill Macy said he was.

Gary's boots sink into soft ground and he looks to see a new grave, the earth freshly churned. No metal bars on this grave, no: he drops to his knees, feeling the damp sink into his jeans, he pushes his hands into the mud past his wrists. It slides between his fingers like entrails. It squelches and pulls at his bones.

It's raining harder now but that's no matter, and Kieren Walker is still out there - with _Simon_, out there planning chaos with _Simon_ - but that's no matter, because sooner or later they'll turn rabid and who'll be around to end it? No point in bitterness, Roarton'll need him again soon enough...

His palm is stinging. Gary frees it from the ground and sees the beads of blood mixed with clumps of dirt. There's mud packed under his fingernails with bits of grass like shredded flesh. He makes a fist and feels the pain swell. But is it blood or gluey earth between his fingers?

Gary brings his hand to his mouth and tastes it. The blood and the earth sit on his tongue and he is consumed with sharp pleasure, sated at last.


End file.
